I would tell you that you were nuts. That’s right I still cannot believe where I have wound up in life. Anyone who knew me growing up would be thinking the same and laughing hysterically along with me. Honestly, a monk–me?? A MONK!! (and it’s a four letter word even). I will admit it gets a bit confusing here, so let’s back up and I’ll try to explain how this all happened.

See it was 1997; I had just gone through a rough break up. That’s the nice way of calling it when the fiancee looks at you and says she needs the cocaine more than you so get the fuck out. I got out. Got depressed to. Planned out to kill myself (why else would my home town of Calgary have such lovely bridges over the Bow River?). In the midst of cleaning out (always rude to leave clutter for those you are going to leave behind) that I stumbled upon that little red pocket Bible you were given in gade 5 by the Gideon’s.

It was one of those aha moments; see it was snapped open under clutter in a trunk of mine (see I may not have been a Christian, but there’s something about any religions book of scripture that you just can’t throw it out). I looked down and saw red, not I wasn’t mad, and it was one of those Bibles with the words of Christ in red ink. King of eye catching.

But when the Pharisees heard Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. One of them, a lawyer asked Him a question testing him, “Teacher, which is the greatest commandment in the Law?”

And He said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul and will all your mind. This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, you shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”

Okay I got a niggle in the back of my mind. Maybe all those summers at Vacation Bible School was kicking in. I figured I had managed to successfully avoid the whole evil hypocrites in the church my whole life, but my life was over, might as well give it a shot for my last day on earth, not like I had anything against God, just his fan club if you will.

So I called my Nanny and made arrangements to go to church with her and a family friend that Sunday. I felt good as we entered the building, looked at the watch and did the mental count down to my last breath.

It was weird, the church started, but didn’t. Fifteen minutes before hand they did a pre-sing, I didn’t last a song. The first hymn up was “Amazing Grace“. It was in the words of a wretch being saved that I saw a man before me in white. He had a simple message for me, “it will be alright, Ty”. A simple message taht shook me to my core, y’see it was what my Granddad had told me when I was 16 years old and now this other guy was saying it.

My plan was forgotten as I took his hand and accepted his offer for sanity for a split second… what a split second because sanity was not to be in the cards for the ride that lay ahead of me. But in that moment I had no clue what cards I was about to turn over.